Kevin Walling

August 2019 - TD Magazine

The Hershey talent agenda is driving the company’s innovative vision.

Competitiveness and Compassion in Action

Read Part One of this blog series here.What are the zombies consuming? This may well reduce down to a fundamental question: What’s dominant in each person’s brain stem: fight or flight, transaction or transformation, selfless servant leaders or selfishness?Let’s assume we are hamstrung or did not flawlessly execute Jim Collins’s (Good to Great) adage: Identify and hire the right people and move them in or to the right positions. If we don’t or haven’t, sooner or later the unattended are likely to shuffle off elsewhere because:lack of trust pervades from disingenuous words and actions to layoffsemployees crave to hear “thank you” and how their work has aided progress, productivity, or profitdead-end jobs dominateinvitations are seldom received to any given seat at the tables, thus affecting contribution as well as effective and productive performancepeople look busy but are not on taskwhispering groups halt or break apart when a particular person walks inperfection, not excellence, is soughtservice is punctuated with complaints or compliancecomplaints are unaccompanied by solutionstask completion supplants growth, development, cooperation, and process improvement.These characteristics, however, are effects, not causes, of disengagement. Revealed in what people do and say, culture matters. Fortunately, building great environments is not mysterious, and the jury has rendered basic truths: beyond fair, equitable compensation, neither money nor compliance alters levels of engagement. Rather, engagement is cultivated through job match; a deliberate effort to ascertain what motivates each individual; being involved in decision-making and problem solving; and not isolated but open, networked communication accompanied by clearly broadcasted expectations.We all have our blind spots in seeing ourselves, and sometimes in understanding others, so first, if we want to reenergize the zombies, we need to feed our brains. A nutritious start? Please read the scaffolded hyperlinks and authors included in this series and peruse Kevin Kruse’s newsletter, Bob Nelson’s blog, and free Globoforce resource materials.Most importantly, we need to identify where to focus to ignite passions and uniquely tailor growth opportunities. Collecting and mining engagement survey data answers this need. Note three key priorities emphasized by Ken Blanchard: start with a valid assessment, tie assessment to specific outcomes, and devote resources to implementation. The engagement survey should maintain respondents’ confidentiality. Because trust is a crucial engagement driver, employees should trust that follow-up and follow-through in responding to results is immediate, and no one should be threatened by completing the survey or participating in focus groups. If disposition and will (actions and words) to face the challenges and implement changes are lacking, stop reading here. Mindful of the sustenance zombies crave, failure of timely follow through after gathering data will surely result in even less engagement and trust, not more.

Disengagement and The Walking Dead: Part Two

Our family is hosting an 8th grade foreign exchange student. Our visitor loves soccer, and we could be ardent American sports imperialists; fortunately, we’re casual watchers who boast no fanatical hoopla. While we have scheduled a variety of south Louisiana activities, from the obligatory swamp tour to festivals galore, our discovery process began with our guest’s likes, namely The Walking Dead, which incidentally we’ve never watched.Why start with our visitor’s interests? For most of the 20th century, education was built upon a medical model (much of it still is): diagnose a problem and prescribe a cure. Despite advocates from Montessori to Vygotsky, only recently have educators focused more intimately on the learner to foster successes. Learning about our visitor’s likes and dislikes, rather than imposing our own predilections, is pivotal to cultivating a positive, meaningful experience for all. A fulfilling experience depends on what motivates her. Similarly, what’s crucial to workplace engagement is what motivates each employee.We need our guest to help us discover how to shape her engagement or, to paraphrase Kevin Kruse and Hogan Associates, to create a psychological state embodied in positive, meaningful involvement, where potential is maximized and where pride of membership is demonstrated through initiative, purpose, energy, discretionary effort, and persistence. Our household is aiming for better success than the 1 in 3 engagement rate commonly found in the workplace, where rather than engaged workers, employers have created a cottage industry—some might argue McSubdivisions of engagement consulting firms.Our immersion efforts are, like the workplace, a cultural enterprise. Classical definitions by Edward Hall and Enrique Trueba emphasize that culture is “revealed in what people do” and “transmitted by communication.” Not surprisingly, one of the universal and reciprocal descriptors of culture, communication, also positively moves the engagement needle. Language theory refers to “received standards” or how well, contextually and in time, words work through formal or informal discourse. In the workplace, for example, timely welcoming of ideas and suggestions is pivotal to ownership and better executed initiatives. Or, for instance, when and how groups are asked to construct values, vision, and mission, the execution of which affects the depth of conviction and relevance of team members, or conversely, employee silence as evidenced when pointing at the un-memorized posting of the company’s mission statement.At home, during our first cross-cultural dinner, delicately avoiding the topic of eating brains, our conversation centered around the social implications of The Walking Dead—specifically, how individuals and groups act under extreme circumstances, a quandary that Gallup among others suggest also applies to workplace engagement. The television series writers may turn the tide in the living’s favor.The next installments of this series will focus on workplace scripts that can turn the cultural wave of our “walking dead,” the disengaged merely in quest of devouring a paycheck. To be sure, disengagement is not a disease to be cured. The zombies have a heartbeat. The question is: “Are we feeling the pulse?”

Kevin Walling

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